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Anticipatory Environmental (Hi)Stories from Antiquity to the Anthropocene studies the interplay of environmental perception and the way societies throughout history have imagined the future state of “nature” and the environments in which coming generations would live. What sorts of knowledge were and are involved in outlining future environments? What kinds of texts and narrative strategies were and are developed and modified over time? How did and do scenarios and narratives of the past shape (hi)stories of the future? This book answers these questions from a diachronic as well as a cross-cultural perspective. By looking at a diverse range of historical evidence that transcends stereotypical utopian and dystopian visions and allows for nuanced insights beyond the dichotomous reservoir of pastoral motifs and apocalyptic narratives, the contributors illustrate the multifaceted character of environmental anticipation across the ages.
The first study of the synergies between postcolonialism and the genre of the short story composite, Unsettling Stories considers how the form of the interconnected short story collection is well suited to expressing thematic aspects of postcolonial writing on settler terrain. Unique for its comparative considerations of American, Canadian, and Australian literature within the purview of postcolonial studies, this is also a considered study of the difficult place of the postcolonial settler subject within academic debates and literature. Close readings of work by Tim Winton, Margaret Laurence, William Faulkner, Stephen Leacock, Sherwood Anderson, Olga Masters, Scott R. Sanders, Thea Astley, Tim O’Brien and Sandra Birdsell are positioned alongside critical discussions of postcolonial theory to show how awkward affiliations of individuals to place, home, nation, culture, and history expressed in short story composites can be usefully positioned within the broader context of settler colonialism and its aftermath.
Adolescence has been codified as an unpredictable, experimental and liminal time. Teenage Time reads this phase as queer in its framing and disruption of developmental narratives of modernity, showing that the identity of the teenager, as it has been culturally perceived in different epochs developing since the 1940s, has shaped the temporal imaginary of the 20th and 21st century. From the conception of the teenager after the Second World War, through notions of rebellion and consumption peaking in the 1980s and 1990s, to representations of their precarious futures amidst the political, social, economic and environmental uncertainties of today, Pamela Thurschwell exposes British and American...
Practically anything can be a model of or for something else. What characterizes models is rather their specific reductive relationality, which often promotes understanding but is always generative rather than merely representational. The essays in Breaking and Making Models engage with the normative and performative qualities of models, their aesthetic and political dimensions, and their world-making potentials. Bringing such perspectives into a broad interdisciplinary dialogue, this book explores ways to work creatively with models.
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Out of many, one—e pluribus unum—is the motto of the American nation, and it sums up neatly the paradox that Stephanie Foote so deftly identifies in Regional Fictions. Regionalism, the genre that ostensibly challenges or offers an alternative to nationalism, in fact characterizes and perhaps even defines the American sense of nationhood. In particular, Foote argues that the colorful local characters, dialects, and accents that marked regionalist novels and short stories of the late nineteenth century were key to the genre’s conversion of seemingly dangerous political differences—such as those posed by disaffected Midwestern farmers or recalcitrant foreign nationals—into appealing c...